Known for always looking at the bright side of life, Norwegian pop star Dagny releases “Brightsider” ahead of a summer of Norwegian festival appearances and a run of headline shows in London, Berlin and Amsterdam.
Coming from her hit debut album Strangers/Lovers, Dagny describes the song as “just meeting someone who makes you feel something.”
“It’s not really so much about the person, but rather the feeling itself,” she admitted, “Cause I think I was writing it at a time when I was emotionally numb, and I was holding on to anything that made me feel something,”
A dreamy, energetic electro-pop jam, Dagny’s vocals bring an ethereal edge to the song as she sings about all the feelings that came her way.
“It’s a song about what I wanted to feel like rather than what I was feeling at the moment and it was such a process to write this song because it felt like it was important to me in so many different ways,” she said.
Born to a musical family, Dagny’s relationship with music was love at first sight, having picked up the guitar as a child and became essentially inseparable from it.
“It just became my biggest passion and I guess I just never stopped. I haven’t found anything in my life yet that I’m as interested in as I am in music,” she stated.
With her “energetic” sound and upbeat tunes, Dagny describes her music as an avenue for her to “get out all my energy”. This results in a sound that blends summery vibes, electro pop with lyrics of longing and hope. Though she is more well known for her happy songs, Dagny expressed that she does not want to just limit herself to just that.
“It just has a way of sneaking in even when I don’t intentionally try to make happy songs. For me, my music has become a way for me to get my energy out. My music is just an enhancement of that side of me, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have other sides. There’s obviously a danger in becoming too known for doing only happy songs because you put limits on your creativity. There’s a time for everything, right now I’m writing and trying to experiment a lot with the way I’m writing.”
To date, Dagny’s music has been streamed over a billion times across all streaming services, she’s been nominated for 6 Norwegian Grammy’s (Spellemannprisen), co-written songs for Katy Perry, Ashnikko, and Julie Bergan, and collaborated with acts including EDM duo Seeb, American super-producer Steve Aoki, Liverpool indie-rock heroes The Wombats and Spanish-English indie-pop outfit Crystal Fighters.
“Brightsider” is now available on all major streaming platforms nationwide. To promote the single, Dagny recently embarked on a sold-out Norwegian tour that lasted for over two months, selling over 16,000 tickets in the process. She now returns to play a headline show in London on 17th September, along with dates in Berlin and Amsterdam, a busy summer of Norway festivals – perhaps most notably a prestigious slot on the main stage at Norway’s biggest summer festival Øyafestivalen alongside Gorillaz, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, and Florence and the Machine.